Crackdown In-Depth: Firearms

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Part three of our weeklong Crackdown blowout.

By Billy Thomson, Lead Designer of Crackdown

Welcome to Part III of our Crackdown coverage brought directly to us from Real Time Worlds. Each day they'll go in-depth with one of the abilities in Crackdown with new screens and movies to illustrate their points.

Firearms Skill Overview Today we'll be going over the Firearms skill and how the player can progress what is possibly the most used of all the skills in Crackdown - everyone seems to like nothing better than shooting their load into a bad guy's soft fleshy ass&#Array;

Our main focus of the Firearms skill was to ensure that we provided a solid set of varied but balanced weapons each with their own unique qualities and uses that were as rewarding as possible during play. This is usually a difficult task for any game, but when you throw in the addition of skill development for the use of the weapons&#Array; then it starts to get a little bit more complicated.

Inspiration Our main goal for the firearms skill was to make each and every player feel like a super-quick rail-gunning Quake veteran, a Counter Strike head-shot legend, a gun-toting sharp-shooting crime-fighting god! Crackdown is an intense fast-paced game with very smart AI so we had to ensure that players could very quickly take aim and fire at their target. This is where our Precision Targeting system comes in. In Crackdown the player can (and needs to!) quickly shift focus from enemy to enemy using the target lock, but he also has at his disposal the ability to rapidly switch between different precision target points. For characters this is 'legs' to drop them, 'arms' to disarm them, or 'head' to spray grey matter all over their buddies. The equivalent precision target points for vehicles are 'tyres' to disable the vehicle, making it swerve spectacularly, 'driver' to neutralise the threat completely, or 'gas cap' to turn the vehicle into a devastating bomb.

We made sure that the visual design of our weapons remained grounded in the here and now; Crackdown is not set in the future, it's set in a contemporary city so we avoided certain stereotypical futuristic types of equipment that would have given us too much of a sci-fi edge. That's not to say that we can't stretch reality to a certain degree as the series progresses - as I said before, there are some incredibly intelligent people working for the tech department of the Agency and God only knows what they're up to right now behind closed doors&#Array;

Progression What's the first thing anyone does with a shotgun? Answer: both barrels get emptied into the nearest hapless civilian! With the incredible levels of population in Pacific City we're often asked if the player is punished for killing civs. The answer is 'yes'&#Array;up to a point. In the same way that multiple skills can be boosted by kills resulting from a combo of different attacks (e.g. roundhouse - empty clip - detonate), the progression of those skills can also be halted or even degraded by killing innocents. Psychopaths fear not though because skill points are periodically 'banked', becoming immune to this process. Continued and excessive collateral damage will eventually result in the city's remaining cops entirely switching focus to the eradication of a 'rogue agent'. Unfortunately taking on an entire police force is such a blast that it's not quite the discouragement we intended it to be!

But back to the guns! We wanted a great set of weapons to be available to the player regardless of his character's skill level (though the player himself will certainly need to be skilled to get his hands on some of them). We were determined that the firearms skill would develop an Agent's mastery of the weapons: better dealing with the recoil of a weapon, reducing the effects of accuracy while on the move, increasing the speed at which they can attain maximum accuracy, even on a target at the very edge of the horizon.

Firearms Abilities At the base level an Agent can actually hit any target (or Precision Targeting point) they wish with a firearm, regardless of its size or distance, all they need to do is have patience and, over time, the Agent will gradually maximise focus. Focus time can be reduced by stopping and, better still, crouching. This tactic is fine to use for taking out a single gang member, but it will alert other enemies in the area.

A four star Firearms Agent can hit just about anything, regardless of the size, distance or speed of the target, whether the Agent is stationary or leaping through the air. Maximum accuracy will come fast to Agents who have mastered the art of firearms in the field - no target will be safe!

Crackdown starts off with some fast-paced shooting but, as you can see, by the time the Agent is fully trained in the use of firearms they can very quickly find a target, take aim, and pop its head like a watermelon - what the hell, he's probably doing it from the roof of a fast moving vehicle too!